Glossary · AI Act
Transparency Obligations (Article 50)
The AI Act duties to disclose when people interact with AI, and when content is AI-generated or manipulated.
Explained in depth: AI Act overview
Article 50 sets transparency duties that apply regardless of the high-risk regime. Providers must ensure people are informed when they interact with an AI system (chatbots), unless it is obvious from context. AI-generated or manipulated audio, image, video, and text content must be marked as such in a machine-readable format. Deployers of emotion recognition or biometric categorisation systems must inform the people exposed to them. Deployers who publish deepfakes must disclose the artificial origin, and AI-generated text published to inform the public on matters of public interest must be disclosed unless it underwent human editorial review with responsibility taken. These duties apply from 2 August 2026 alongside the general application of the act.
Why it matters
Transparency duties reach far beyond AI companies: any business running a customer-facing chatbot or publishing AI-generated marketing content is touched. The fixes are mostly cheap (labels, disclosures, watermarking support), which makes non-compliance hard to defend.